guitar
Adam Sweeting
Tucked away in a warren of residential streets in the older part of Guildford, The Old Glassworks looks like a lock-up garage, and seems to have been designed to repel unwanted attention with a private force-field of anonymity. Once you've been welcomed inside, however, you find yourself in an improbable wonderland of mysterious musical instruments, from lutes and rare 17th century guitars to members of the violin family in various states of deconstruction.Above all, you'll find the newly-built guitars of the owner of the establishment, Brian Cohen. Born in South Africa but resident in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
So the Coral have hit their eighth studio album, Distance Inbetween. This is, I’m ashamed to say, news to me. It’s like realizing that a show you used to really like transferred to Sky Atlantic and you’ve failed to keep up and extend your subscription. The question then is how will it be, jumping in now, so far down the line? Particularly when their last offering – 2014’s release of "lost" album, The Curse of Love – comprised an extended flashback sequence that received a mixed response. This is, I’m assuming, the first time that the Coral will have found themselves compared to the ‘85-‘86 Read more ...
theartsdesk
Guitar Hero Live ★★★★My first encounter with the Guitar Hero music rhythm games stretches back to 2008. It involved British Sea Power, the Mercury Prize-nominated indie band, trooping into my living room to put an array of plastic guitars and drums through the musical motions. More bemused than amused, the professional musicians, renowned for intricately arranged guitar pop, struggled to hit the correct colour-coded notes in the right sequence as they appeared on the TV.“It’s great fun, but nothing like making music,” conceded Jan Scott Wilkinson, the front man, as he fumbled his way down a Read more ...
Barney Harsent
If there was any doubt as to the musical preferences of BBC4's commissioning arm, consider this: the whole history of funk got an hour. Meanwhile, indie music – a niche, artistic movement that somehow ended up drinking champagne while wallowing in its own mess by the mid-Nineties – gets a three-part series. Just thought I’d mention it.With time on its side, as we began part two, Music for Misfits was up to the Eighties. Following last week’s implication that punk was some kind of year zero for privately pressed records (it wasn’t), this episode started with the claim that, in the Read more ...
David Nice
It was a sad coincidence that this Monday Platform “showcasing talented young artists” took place only weeks after the death in a road accident of Roderick Lakin, Director of Arts for 31 years at the Royal Over-Seas League which was last night's backer. For no concert could have been more sensitively tuned to a personal farewell. Overt melancholy only surfaced in the slow-movement theme of Brahms’s Second Piano Trio. But wouldn’t you want Dowland, Bach and Schubert at your memorial concert? I know I would, and especially from these artists, all so inclined to mature introspection that they Read more ...
Russ Coffey
On paper, Richard Thompson's career seems every bit as exotic as one of his songs: At the age of 18 he helped found folk-rock pioneers, Fairport Convention. Later, in the Seventies, he and wife Linda recorded several successful records together before retreating to a Sufi Muslim commune.After returning to music, Thompson relocated to LA, where his unique combination of British folk and virtuoso rock guitar made him a connoisseurs' choice. In recent years Thompson has curated South Bank’s Meltdown festival, been awarded an OBE, and had a Grammy-nominated record. Yet he remains the Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s no doubting the precocious talent of Laura Marling. At just 25 she recently released her fifth album, Short Movie, which matched the spiky introspection of song-writing previously driven by folk melodies with a new rock-orientated sound. Inspired by her two-year sojourn in LA, from which she returned late last year, the album tells of the usual romantic yearnings and scorned or broken love affairs, mixed with tales of everyday encounters with new age Californian mystics. A sense of both the expansive West Coast landscape and of cosmic space meets altered consciousness, prevailed. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival is cunningly scheduled for that particularly dreary fortnight in late February when winter has been going on forever, spring is still just out of reach, and half term brings the dismal realisation that we're only just halfway through the school year and summer holidays are still at least five months away. When you're longing to be somewhere else, there's nothing like flamenco, a raw, gritty music-and-dance form born among the dispossessed of southern Spain.It's come a long way since then, of course, and the flamenco stars imported by Sadler's Wells are no Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While much of Hexadic is a blast, the first album from Six Organs of Admittance since 2012’s Ascent offers much that’s familiar: the snail’s pace heaviosity and shifts between bone-crushing density and desiccated sparseness of Dylan Carlson’s Earth, spaghetti-western guitar interludes (also favoured by Carlson), an approach to malformed riffing and guitar mangling blending Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth, Harry Pussy and early Pussy Galore. Six Organs of Admittance’s prolific constant presence Ben Chasny used to be tarred as freak-folk, but nowadays his various musical guises hop with ease Read more ...
Tim Cumming
You’d have to go back almost 20 years, and to 1996's Spirit, to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs. The nine for Band of Brothers was a real cause for celebration. He may be 81, he may not fly over to perform in the UK again (I hope to be proved wrong) but he's not lost form.These new songs sound like they had to be written, and from the inside. They’re co-written with producer Buddy Cannon, and the working method was for Nelson to send Cannon demos of the songs, around which Cannon arranged a sympathetic acoustic band line–up of seasoned sessioneers – a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The future's uncertain and the end is always near, as Jim Morrison put it, and you wonder how long Oz's antique rockers can keep cranking it up. After 41 years, most of them vastly successful, they're now missing guitarist and riff-creator Malcolm Young (who's suffering from dementia), while it's not clear whether drummer Phil Rudd is still on board after a drugs bust and allegations that he was trying to get somebody killed.Despite all that, Rock or Bust, their 16th studio album, manages to deliver a few jolts of the old megaton swagger. Angus Young is still there on lead guitar, and judging Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Compared to grand divas, virtuoso pianists or stupendous fiddlers, legends of the classical guitar have been few in number. Once you've ticked off Segovia, Julian Bream and John Williams you're pretty much done with the household names. This isn't to impugn the musical powers of players such as Craig Ogden, Pepe Romero, Sharon Isbin or David Russell, it's more a reflection of the niche nature of the instrument. If Beethoven or Mozart had written guitar concertos – or Berlioz, an accomplished guitarist – who knows how different it could have been.Montenegro-born Miloš Karadaglić is doing his Read more ...